The Latest Wall Street Trading Scam That Costs You Billions
by ilene - July 22nd, 2009 10:05 am
The Latest Wall Street Trading Scam That Costs You Billions
Courtesy of Henry Blodget at Clusterstock
A paper has been going around that describes a startling new world of high-velocity computerized trading that causes volume and volatility to soar and costs ordinary investors billions of dollars.
The paper, Toxic Equity Trading On Wall Street, appears to have been published late last year by Sal Arnuk and Joseph Saluzzi from a firm called Themis Trading. (One word of caution: We have not yet verified a single assertion made in the paper, and we had not heard of Themis Trading. We would be grateful if those of you with insight into this would help us understand the real facts here.)
The paper is embedded below (you can also download it at Themis’s web site). Here, in brief, is the world it describes:
Many trading orders these days are executed by computers. Like human traders, the computers break big orders into small chunks (say, 100 or 500 shares) and then match them with orders on electronic stock exchanges. The reason the orders are broken into chunks is so they won’t move the market too much. Stock trading is relatively illiquid, and big orders can drive the price of a stock sharply up or down. Since the dawn of Wall Street time, clever traders have tried to hide the amount of stock they ultimately want to buy or sell to avoid having their own orders move the market sharply against them.
In recent years, such "algorithmic" electronic trading execution has grown in popularity, and a number of electronic trading strategies have sprung up to exploit it.
In one of these strategies, called "liquidity rebate trading," a program analyzes the incoming order flow on an electronic exchange to try to spot a big institutional order that is just hitting the market (apparently this is relatively easy to do). The program then front-runs the order by modestly outbidding the institution for the stock and then turning around and selling it to the institution at a higher price than the institution would have otherwise paid.
Front-running is an age-old cheating technique: A trading firm gets a big order from a client and, before it executes it, buys some of the same stock for itself. Front-running is, in fact, what many Wall Street insiders thought Bernie Madoff was doing before they discovered he…